


Writer In A Drawer: The First Six

by copperbadge



Series: Writer In A Drawer 2009 [1]
Category: Torchwood
Genre: Amnesia, F/M, Hallucinations, M/M, Poisoning, Time Agency, Time Travel, WWII, involuntary drug use
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-09-30
Updated: 2009-09-30
Packaged: 2017-12-22 12:41:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,149
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/913342
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/copperbadge/pseuds/copperbadge
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>My first six entries for the Torchwood Writer In A Drawer Competition, 2009</p>
            </blockquote>





	Writer In A Drawer: The First Six

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into 中文 available: [代为人父](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1457689) by [Qirunwei](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Qirunwei/pseuds/Qirunwei)



> This story and the other stories in the series were entries in "Writer in a Drawer", a fic-writing competition in which competitors were eliminated week by week based on the popularity of their submitted stories for the week. 
> 
> Thanks to Waldo for running the competition and being a fantastic hardworking mod, and Foxy for blowing BETA SPARKLES all over every entry.

Title: I Went To The Animal Fair  
Rating: G  
Summary: Torchwood contemplates the capture of an escaped zoo animal.  
Theme: Drabble; added element, zoo animal.  
Word Count: 100 Exactly  
Score: 12 (-1, +13). Won the round. 

"Ever been in a zoo when an animal got free?" Ianto asked, staring up at the...the giant anenome floating in Britain's sky. "I have. School trip. Springbok escaped. They kick."

"So...they're more afraid of you than you are of them?" Gwen suggested.

"I was going with _terrified animals are dangerous_ , actually."

"Okay!" Jack called, patting the giant net-launcher. "Ready to help the people of Klathon retrieve their prize Dvvnvvtvv for the Galactic Sanctuary?"

"Will it try to eat us?" Ianto asked. Jack hesitated.

"Possibly?" he ventured.

Ianto sighed. "I'll just add zookeeper to our job descriptions, shall I?"

* * *

Title: Show Me Your Schematics  
Rating: PG  
Summary: Jack bribes a young mechanic into helping him with a problem with his Spitfire.  
Theme: Favor. One of our characters needs a favor from someone; added element, a city foreign to your character.  
Word count: Limited To 400  
Score: 3 (-1, +4).

"Gremlins," Harkness announced.

"Sure, why not?" Henderson said, closing the Spitfire's engine casing and wiping her hands. "Nothing wrong with your engine."

"It's gremlins," Harkness replied.

"Sir?"

"Gremlins, rigger."

Henderson frowned. "Gremlins don't _exist_ , captain. I mean, mythical imps that mess with engines?"

"I know how it sounds. Why do you think we're doing this after lights-out in an empty hangar?"

She blushed.

"My reputation precedes me," Harkness laughed. "What's the time?"

Henderson checked her watch. "Minute to midnight."

"Great. Watch the Spitfire."

"What?"

"Watch," he whispered in her ear. She obeyed, perplexed. After a few seconds there was a glimmer of movement along the fuselage, another on the propeller. Sparks flew.

"What -- " she started. Harkness clapped a hand over her mouth. The sparks were coalescing into tiny silver creatures, creeping around the plane. One raised a claw, shoved it through the engine case, and...twiddled.

"Gremlins," the Captain repeated, releasing her.

"Where'd they come from?" she asked, furious and awed.

"Don't know. Maybe they're aliens," he said casually. "Nicosia is a pretty town but it's a little far from the kind of help I usually have, which is why I'm showing you this. I need your help getting rid of the infestation."

" _My_ help?"

"You're the best mechanic on base. Someone who knows Spitfires intimately," he replied, with a hint of a grin.

"Why?" she asked.

"To rig a trap. You have roaches, you put down bait. Same theory."

They watched as the gremlins continued their inspection, one of them dropping into the cockpit to toy with the throttle. Finally, Henderson cleared her throat.

"But it's just your plane," she said.

Harkness looked offended. " _Just_ my plane?"

"You know what pilots say. If you tick off the gremlins they'll come after you next. I'm not bringing down _gremlins_ on the entire wing," she said.

"I give them the wonders of the universe..." he muttered. "Fine. What's it worth to you?"

She put her hands on her hips. "Flying lessons."

Instead of spouting the usual flyboy shit about incompetent female pilots, he nodded. "Cheap at the price."

Her jaw dropped.

"You'll be good at it," he added. "Come on. I have schematics to show you."

"Is that what they call it?" she asked tartly. He laughed loud enough to startle the gremlins, who scuttled into dark corners.

"Business first," he said, draping an arm over her shoulders. "Fun later."

* * *

Title: Keep Calm And Carry On  
Rating: PG  
Summary: The Torchwood archives are covered in signs, but at first Ianto doesn't understand why.  
Theme: Signage; added element, a hand gesture, sign or signal.  
Warning: Involuntary (well, accidental) drug use.  
Words: Limited to 500  
Score: 5 (+5). Won the round. 

Jack -- "Call me Jack, everyone does" -- assigned Suzie, his second in command, to give Ianto a first-day "orientation". Ianto privately thought this was a joke, because after a brusque lecture on safety she stood him at the door of the archives and abandoned him.

"Go explore," she said, gesturing at the maze of rooms and corridors. "Be back at half-eleven to order lunch."

Independence and initiative valued at Torchwood Three: Check. 

Of course, he diverted his attention elsewhere, pleased with this autonomy. Until he'd moved Lisa in, he didn't really look at the archives. When he did, it was too late to ask Suzie anything; she thought he'd been exploring for days. 

It was the strange signs on the walls that bothered him, mostly. One demanded to know if he was wearing clean underwear, with a jaunty drawing of Y-fronts beneath it. Another was hung under a bulbous thing with wires dangling like tentacles. The sign was obviously from elsewhere, but it made its point: TOUCHING WIRES CAUSES INSTANT DEATH. Underneath, black humour: _$200 Fine._

There were dozens of them, at least one in every room. They baffled him. Some mad former archivist? Jack's idea of humour? Suzie, fucking with him? 

He grew used to them as time passed, though, and eventually came to regard them in a friendly light. His favourite hung in the central workroom: NOTICE. THANK YOU FOR NOTICING THIS NEW NOTICE. YOUR NOTICING IT HAS BEEN NOTED. AND WILL BE REPORTED TO THE AUTHORITIES. 

But he still didn't realise what their function was until the day he was fetching "That green powder, you know, it's in a yellow vial?" for Jack, and accidentally dropped it. 

The cork burst free and the powder flew up, catching him in the face. He coughed and felt the world tilt dangerously. The walls began to undulate. All sound disappeared into a sucking black hole between his ears.

Hallucinogenic, then. _Brilliant._

The floor vibrated beneath him. There was no way he'd get out; he couldn't even tell doorways from shadows, and there was something... _there..._

A flash of yellow -- he blinked -- the y-front pants were staring him in the face. 

Ianto burst into hysterical laughter, but some part of him knew that the y-fronts led into the hardware room. In the hardware room was the "how not to use a toilet" sign.... 

He giggled and stumbled forward. The signs wouldn't lead him wrong. They were a guide, a reality check, something his predecessor must have hung as a memory device. 

He fell into the workroom finally, groping for the intercom toggle. It dodged and laughed until he managed to yank on it. 

"Little help, please," he mumbled, collapsing. 

A few minutes later Jack and Owen charged in to find him on his back, staring at the NOTICE NOTICE, laughing himself sick. 

"What's so funny?" Jack asked, as Owen declared Ianto stoned but not terminal. 

"Archivist humour," Ianto snickered. "Don't worry, you're not supposed to understand it."

* * *

Title: I Know The Voices Dying  
Rating: PG-13  
Summary: Jack decides a paradox might be a way to solve his little immortality problem, and at the moment he doesn't care who he takes with him.  
Theme: School and lessons; added element, a common school supply  
Words: Less than 500  
Score: -2 (-4, +2)

On the few occasions that paradoxes had come up during Jack's time in the TARDIS, the Doctor been terrifyingly intense in his hatred of them. Rose, often fearless, lived in horror of the Reapers. Jack himself had seen the Master's perverse Paradox Machine and loathed it instinctively. 

The Time Agency, on the other hand, had never much bothered with temporal manners. Cocky spawnsabitches that they were, the Agency meddled, mingled, and fucked around, with the result that agents occasionally winked out of existence. Sometimes they took a planet with them. Eh, such was life; someone could always fix it later. A shrug and a murmur of "Paradox" was the best eulogy the dead got. 

What none of them had seen was the cascade effect it would have, all those little misdemeanors mounting up slowly to wipe out most of the Agency in one shattering event horizon. Or perhaps someone _had_ known; the more Jack thought about the Agency shutting down, the more sense it made. There must have been a cover-up beforehand, because someone had known it would happen.

Him. 

Those missing two years were insignificant now, in the face of his long life, but he'd lay odds they went missing because Jack Harkness saw a pattern and tried to warn the Agency, with inevitable results. 

In that case, they deserved exactly what they got. 

***

When Elisia caught up with him, months after he'd left Gwen and Earth, weeks after he'd acquired his own small but serviceable ship, Jack reckoned they were the only two humans in contemporary space. She told him, standing at gunpoint in his cargo bay, that they were the only two Time Agents left at all.

"Which is why I need you, Punch," she said, as if they were still friends and that nickname was hers to use. "I've heard the stories. Time turns around you."

"John's been tattling," he said.

"John's dead. Paradox'd out."

"And you have a plan?" he asked, ignoring the twinge in his gut. 

"Come with me. You understand what happened. We'll go to the forty-ninth, the founding of the Agency. If we can teach them how to prevent it at the start, we can save them. It'll set all the paradoxes right," she said desperately. 

"Or," Jack mused, "we could do nothing. Let it die."

Her eyes widened. "But that's -- "

"Murder? Kinda. Another paradox? Only until we all wink out of existence," Jack said. "The universe will fix it. I for one will be glad to go."

He flicked a switch. A door slammed between them. Elisia screamed as he airlocked her. 

***

It should have been the end. Without any further action, the entire thing should have reset. No Agency; no Jack Harkness in 1941; no immortality; no murdered grandson; no slain lover. Just blessed, blissful oblivion.

But it never happened. He still lived. 

As it turned out, the immortal was paradox-proof. A joke of the universe; a cosmic slap on the palm with a ruler.

No easy fixes. 

Lesson learned.

* * *

Title: The Water's Fine  
Rating: PG-13  
Summary: Ianto takes a leap of faith.  
Theme: Unexpected Side Effect; added element, advice from your mother  
Word Count: Less than 700.  
Score: 4 (-1, +5). Won the round. 

There are, of course, many things made difficult and awkward in the workplace by a liaison with the boss. It blurs all the lines, for a start, though the lines at Torchwood were pretty blurry already. 

As much as Ianto expected trouble when it became obvious he and Jack were enjoying some extracurriculars, most of it never materialised. Some smart remarks from Gwen; some taunts from Owen. Tosh at least seemed happy for him, in that Please Don't Let's Talk About It way that single people are happy when their friends get involved. 

If they even _were_ "involved", and Ianto was never sure, which made him even less eager to Talk About It. Uncertain of his professional status, hovering between librarian and secret agent, Ianto wasn't any more grounded by the shifting sands of a never-defined personal relationship in which Jack held all the cards. Jack was the boss, the one who'd done this before. And whatever he felt for Ianto, he was almost the only thing Ianto had left. 

Sooner or later it would probably result in a full mental breakdown, this lack of definition to anything in his life.

Sometimes he had restless dreams, especially on the nights Jack stayed at his flat -- as if the anxiety of wondering whether he would be there in the morning (so what if he wasn't? But it did matter) carried over into sleep. His mother, all but faceless for as much as he could remember of her, telling him that the cold water wouldn't be so bad if he jumped in, the plaster wouldn't hurt as much if he ripped it off quickly. 

Well, he'd never been a master of subtle metaphor. 

At first he thought he should just ask Jack, pin him down to a definition, and fuck Jack's dislike of labels. Or he ought to end it, before it ended him, because being so close to someone so untouchable was dangerous. But if he and Jack were over, then all he had was a job that would get him killed, a shabby flat, and a caffeine habit that would kill him if the job didn't. 

Slowly, the idea occurred to him that definition was not, perhaps, necessary. _Things_ needed labels. Objects had form. A chemical reaction could be quantified, but he and Jack couldn't. After Lisa he hadn't ever wanted to be so gutted again, but it wasn't really up to him. Why bother giving it a name in some vain attempt to prevent it falling apart? 

In at a leap, then. If this was what he had to hold to, he would hold to it. If it killed him, it was better than a half-life wondering. In the end it didn't matter what Jack thought he was, in Torchwood or in his bed. 

A week after he'd made the decision, he caught Jack watching him discreetly as he brought up the afternoon coffee. 

"Something on my face?" he asked. Jack leaned back and stretched.

"A smile," Jack said. "You're smiling."

"Am I?"

"Uh-huh. In fact, for the last four days you've brought me a cup of..." Jack paused to sip from his mug, "...delicious coffee, and you've...smiled. Plus you've been kind of mouthy lately."

Ianto quirked an eyebrow. "Apologies, sir. I shall endeavour to be grim and silent as before."

"Don't," Jack said, without the laugh Ianto was angling for. "I like it. Ianto Jones smiles. Because he's thinking of me?"

"No," Ianto answered, collecting the debris of Jack's lunch from the desk. 

"Come on, Ianto. A little of that was for me. Huh? Right?" Jack cajoled. Ianto felt his smile widen. This time Jack did laugh. "I knew it. Euphoria is a common side effect of sleeping with me."

"Must be those pheromones," Ianto murmured. 

"Must be," Jack repeated, his voice dropping low and seductive. "Of course, if you have time now -- "

"Coffee service," Ianto said, already at the door. 

"Cruel!" Jack moaned. Ianto paused and then walked back, swiftly, and pressed a kiss to Jack's lips. 

_Hold to what you have; worry about the rest later._

"It isn't nice to call me names," he said, and disappeared out the door.

* * *

Title: In Loco Parentis  
Rating: PG  
Summary: Jack is retconned back to childhood, and Ianto does what he has to in order to fix it.  
Theme: Amnesia; added element, a television show.  
Word Count: Less than 700  
Score: 3 (-7, +10)

When the explosion hit, no-one but Jack was in the Hub. 

Later, as they reviewed the CCTV, they saw him entering the chem-lab; after a few minutes a bright flare lit up the tempered-glass wall, obscuring Jack from view. 

The logs showed that the automated systems worked just as they should: they scrubbed the air, unlocking the door when it was safe. CCTV showed a confused-looking Jack staggering out, making it to the sofa before he collapsed. 

The next morning Ianto found him there, fast asleep. Strange, really; he did have a bed twenty feet away.

"Jack," he said, loudly. Jack's eyes flew open, startled and confused. "Are you all right? Jack?" 

"Up an at 'em, Jack," Owen called. "Late-night Star Trek marathons are no excuse for oversleeping."

Jack pushed himself against the back of the sofa nervously. 

"My name's not Jack," he said. 

Ianto paused, then reached out and sifted a few grains of fine white powder from the crease of Jack's sleeve. 

***

Retcon overdose was Owen's diagnosis. 

"He must've been making a batch. That much'd fry any normal person's brain," Owen said, pointing to a freeze-frame of the explosion.

"It'd wipe them back to infancy," Tosh agreed. She glanced at the sofa where Ianto was crouched near a terrified Jack, speaking softly.

"Or," Gwen said, as she joined them, "to your early teens, if you're Jack."

"How is he?" Tosh asked.

"Frightened. He doesn't know why he's here, who we are. He's scared of his own body. It's not the one he's used to."

"Can you fix it?" Tosh asked Owen.

"Did we have an antidote for Retcon last time you checked? No," Owen said. "I say we take advantage and interrogate him."

"Look at him," Gwen said softly, ignoring Owen. "I've never seen Jack like that."

As they watched, Ianto said something and Jack nodded hesitantly. Ianto patted him on the leg, then stood and walked away. 

"Is he making _coffee?_ " Tosh asked.

"I could go for a cup," Owen said. Tosh glared at him. "What?"

Gwen gave him a dark look and joined Ianto at the coffee machine, where he was steaming milk.

"All right?" she asked. 

"I've been better," Ianto said. "You know, when he dies, it all resets itself. Usually, I mean. Scars disappear and all."

"You don't think we should kill him, do you?" she asked, horrified. 

"Just an idea," Ianto said. He poured the milk into a mug and carried it up the steps to the sofa, putting it carefully in Jack's open hands. "Here you are. Hot milk. Probably not what you're used to -- "

"It's sweet," Jack remarked. "Tastes like nuts."

Owen's head jerked up and he glanced at Gwen, which was when she began to catch on. Too late; Jack had already taken a second deep drink. 

"Ianto -- " Gwen began, but Ianto was busy taking the cup from Jack's shaking fingers. 

"You drugged me!" Jack said, looking wounded.

"No," Ianto said gently, as Jack collapsed backwards. "I'm sorry, Jack."

They all watched, stunned, as Ianto cupped his face, holding him steady. Once the convulsions had subsided, he let go. 

"You poisoned him," Gwen accused. "He was a child, Ianto! He trusted you!"

"I know," Ianto said.

"You didn't even bother asking."

"You would have said no." 

"Since when do you have access to cyanide?" Owen interrupted. "And why would you keep it near the coffee?"

Ianto didn't bother answering. Minutes passed in silence until Jack jerked forward, gasping. Ianto caught his shoulders.

"God _dammit_ ," was Jack's promising first word. "I _knew_ that batch looked off."

He glanced around at his relieved team, frowning. "What?"

"You blew up the chem-lab," Owen said.

"And I'm still here," Jack drawled. "What, did you think this time my number was up? 'Cause it never is."

"No," Gwen said hastily. "Just glad you're fine, that's all."

Jack rolled his shoulders, cracked his neck, and stood up. "Okay, let's get to work. I'll clean up the lab. Sorry about that."

Possibly Gwen was the only one who noticed the guilt on Ianto's face. 

"It's not easy to do," he murmured, watching Jack walk away. "It just had to be done, that's all."


End file.
